Cognitive Radio Technology (CRT) in IoT

Cognitive Radio Technology (CRT) in IoT

The vision of IoT represents a future where billions of everyday objects and surrounding environments will be connected and managed through a range of communication networks and cloud-based servers and Cognitive radio technology (CRT) is expected to be indispensable in the era of IoT. Basic cognitive radio cycle with five mutually connected phases is shown in fig 1. The idea of intelligent cognitive radio technology is the current solution of wireless communication and provides energy efficient solutions for IoT.

  Advantages of CRT in IoT

·       CRT in which the transmit parameters of the system are not pre-defined and can be adapted freely depending on the current situation, is a good candidate for the IoT.

Fig. 1 Cognitive radio technology cycle

·      Through dynamic spectrum access capabilities, cognitive IoT not only improves spectrum utilization but also exploits alternate spectrum opportunities. Besides, cognitive IoT is inherently equipped to address the challenges such as interference management, energy efficiency, and device heterogeneity.

·       Cognitive radio technology provides as a novel approach to address the spectrum scarcity and spectrum inefficiency issue in wireless networks. In cognitive radio networks, unlicensed spectrum users (secondary users) dynamically access the frequency band/channel whenever the licensed spectrum user (primary user (PU)) is absent and need to vacate the band/channel whenever the PU is detected.

·       Cognitive radio equipped with IoT networks can effectively overcome coverage issues through dynamic spectrum access of better propagation bands such as TVWS bands.

·       The use of CRT has been demonstrated to be energy efficient as devices can adaptively adjust their power transmission levels based on operating and sensing environment.

·       The cognitive ability is particularly suitable for IoT to deal with device and protocol heterogeneity as IoT networks will be more efficient and flexible if devices are smart enough to communicate with others freely.

·       Heterogeneous wireless architectures and dynamic spectrum access techniques will provide high bandwidth to mobile users in Cognitive radio networks.

 Challenges

·       Many connected devices such as hand-held devices, as envisioned for the IoT, will create a major challenge in terms of spectrum scarcity. This radio technology causes so many issues in spectrum access, spectrum sensing, spectrum sharing, spectrum mobility, spectrum management, power management, interference alignment and cancellation issues, spectrum scheduling strategies, priority of primary signal etc.

·       A cognitive machine should can perform different functionalities such as network interconnection, spectrum cognition, network management, etc.

·       Optimizing sharing of sensing and communication resources and coordinating messaging and interference alignment and cancellation, provisioning is also challenging.

·       Network infrastructure for intelligent road traffic management to carry large amount of traffic without any errors in data and with less delay is another technical restriction. Moreover, the possibility of adaptive and intelligent management of the installed wireless access technologies for more effective IoT data exchange is required.

·       The ability of the ‘‘self-recovery’’ of network topology is useful in practical applications where the stability of network operability is required.